Tag: webdev

A change is as good as a rest

I have successfully rendered myself a liar this week. After calling myself “basically unemployable” back in 2018, I started a new part-time position with Source Design this week. Super stressed Jem who couldn’t possibly contemplate a 9-5 way back in 2018 is now super chilled out handling a senior dev position for one firm, managing […]

10 Micro Optimisations for a Faster WordPress Website

(Update 2019-08-07: this article is now available in Brazilian Portuguese: 10 dicas para um site WordPress mais rápido) — Website speed is a huge factor in your search engine (specifically Google) ranking: As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly […]

New project: maths, emails, and an empty ISA

What do you do when you try and find a site that allows the re-sale of preloved cloth nappies but the only one that did exist has closed down operations? You buy the site of course. As briefly alluded to in the last post, I’ve bought into a new project which I’m hoping will give […]

100% Freelance

I’ve mentioned a couple of times this month that I’ve been working with a client for a dedicated 8 hours a week to give me a little bit of fixed income and gets me out of the house twice a week. Despite needing to get out of the house, I’ve decided to change the arrangement: […]

Taking it Personally

I had a couple of clients (rightly) tell me off this week because schedules had slipped and this wasn’t communicated as well as it could have been. I only have myself to blame, and I don’t mind being honest about it. I should have better anticipated the impact of the summer holidays and time off […]

Mail Form Updates

I officially released the premium version of my PHP mail form last night. Partly because it’s been on the cards for a while, and partly because I wanted to get started on my plan to be mortgage free in five years. I can’t hang about if I need to be paying in £1,633.09 per month. […]

HostPapa? More like HostCrapper*

* sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I opened my work inbox first thing to a panicked email from a client (Sutton Community Farm) labelled “URGENT” – their website had gone down (again) with a Resource Limit Reached error. I quickly shot off a reply to let them know that this was usually caused by […]

Programming Sucks

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem […]